[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[von Adlercreutz]

Reasons to be cheerful: Novice/Krill the pre-game favourites are his neighbour, and if anyone can stunt dtay's development it'll be them. Also he won't want an early Astronomy, which could give an opportunity to target his overseas possessions...

Yes, you have reputation as the most fierce naval invaders to protect!

[Old Harry]

Turn 133

We're going to rest up and heal all our knights to be 9.9 or 10/10 this turn. While they wait we walked into Milpool. No infrastructure survived.


I sooo want to snipe this city, but it requires us or Mardoc to take Dental Plan first... The Welly isn't the real issue, it's the Longbow that we don't get odds on. These border cities are all at 40% culture, so we need to come up with some way of bypassing them.


In international news it looks like these are exciting times for Automated Teller, HitAnyKey and Yuris. AT must have taken Haarlem in the last few turns. Will he keep going with all those Praetorians?


In the east Krovice are gaining some nice land , and simultaneously preventing dtay from gaining it . It would be better if they'd fight each other though .


This the world as we know it. Apologies for all the signs. We've still got to meet German Joey, Zanth, BaII, Bacchus, Wetbandit, Nakor, Q and Caledorn.


Here are all our cities - any votes for which one we put the Heroic Epic into?

Demos, Espionage and Power

[Ceiliazul]

I cant believe you got forests with NoHomer's BFC, even after 100 years of Azzan war.

Also, heroic epic seems obvious to me...

not telling!

[Old Harry]

Having a quick look at the heroic epic hammer potential (out of caste and taking food into account):
C - 22
D - 24
G - 21
H - 33
No Homers - 38 (buldoze 7 cottages)
HJ - 33 (farm four cottages)
pmw - 34 (farm 6 cottages)
Boo - 33

So I think Hazelnut is our best bet if we don't want to sacrifice 7 cottages. It lets us build land and sea units and is just about done with infra, so unless I hear objections I'll settle the gg there next turn.

Ceil:

[retep]

Things are going well, I'm of course taking all the credit after the game (even though I haven't even post much lately)

About Heroic Epic, why not in Boo? How much infra does it need actually?
The city is in a center location in the island/continent So units build over there have to travel less time to where they need to go.

[Old Harry]

I like HE to be able to build naval units, but a coastal site does make it risky and we will have drydocks soonish, so maybe I'm wrong...

The main reason is that hazel is five pop and 300 hammers (edit: forge, barracks, stable, sacrificial altar) further along the track, so delaying for a similar quality site just doesn't work for me. I'd go for No Homers over it as that could have 38 base hammers and the forests, but those cottages are just too valuable.

[TheHumanHydra]

Random note in response to your overview post (very nice): cho-ko-nus can collateral off ships, too, I believe, not just vs. siege.

[Old Harry]

Random note in response to your overview post (very nice): cho-ko-nus can collateral off ships, too, I believe, not just vs. siege.

Mental note - check what units Pindi has running around his land.

It looks like dtay played before Whosit this turn and took a city off Cheater Hater, presumably he signed peace with Whosit and will leave Krovice to finish him off and is turning his attention to CH. We tried to warn you man . Our scout will report from the front lines in the next couple of turns.

Is it worth our while building a couple of galleys and boating some units (Knights, Cats and Pikes) over to CH's land instead of finishing Azza off. That way Mardoc would waste some power taking the remaining cities off Azza and we could inflict some damage on or totally stop dtay as he slogs through enemy culture? I'm not keen on him getting a foothold just across the water from us... Mental note #2 - check EP ratio to see if dtay has visibility on CH's cities.

[Old Harry]

Looking back I think I found out how Azza did the deed at Mardoc's capital...

Turn 114

This is probably the most interesting pic of the turn:




2. There are a handful of units in Nothing at All and a CR III Great General Axe NE of the city. Maybe Azza wants to make something happen here after all...

That CRIII Axe still has a promo, and a galley went past there soon after this shot...

[Fintourist]

Nice discussion here! I was planning to respond to everybody, but that must wait.. I went in to see how the situation looks like and we have BIG news!

Mardoc went in and attacked Dental Plan!!

Here's the situation:



It looks beautiful for us. It seems Mardoc sacrificed most of his cats and who knows how many other units. Azza lost basically his remaining army. (Azza got a GG that is currently in Aurora, which is something to keep in mind. It could in fact kill a catapult from us if we don't cover it, but I guess trading cat for GG axe would be an ok deal for us.

We have couple of options:

1. We just go in, capture the Dental Plan, put our knights in the city and probably hold the city.
2. We go in and raze the DP
3. We go in, raze the DP and try to raze Orange as well
4. We go in, raze/capture DP and try to kill as many Mardoc units as possible
5. We wait for one turn so that Mardoc takes DP, our knights are healed and we try to kill every single one of Mardoc's units
6. We do nothing

I am voting for option number 5. Options 1&2 don't offer than much for us. Option 3 makes a bit more damage, but is counter-productive as well. And I don't think we have quite enough units so that option 4 would work nicely. We have lots of knights that really could use that 1 turn of healing. Hmmmmmmmmm...... Actually forget everything I said!
This is what we do:

1. No moves this turn. We keep the first split towards Mardoc
2. Azza plays, does what Azza does.
3. We pay attention and play before Mardoc, or at least PM him and say that we are about to declare and we don't want him to double-move.
4. We use 4 HAs to take the city (might need to be knights if Azza has promo-healed his axes and spears nicely)
5. This leaves us with 13 knights, ~3 HAs, ~3 axes, a chariot and a cat
6. We use them and kill every single one of Mardoc's units in the above picture. (18 units on those two tiles)

Actually, Mardoc's units are so wounded/weak (chariots and LBs out of the city) that we can also do this at the end of this turn despite the fact that more than half of our knights are wounded and between 5-8 strenght. We just use our healthy knights for Mardoc's top defenders and wounded knights/HAs/axes for cleaning up.

Now the question is. Whis is the more appropriate way to play (end of this turn/before mardoc next turn)? Background is this:

Azza played.
We played.
Mardoc played.

We would not be double-moving Mardoc if we would attack immediately, but I guess it's more fair that we wait for next turn? As said it means that Azza gets a chance to promo-heal his defenders but well, our knights will heal as well. In this case we maybe need to PM Mardoc and ask him not to double-move us (unless you can pay attention to civstats replacement and have nothing to do tomorrow)?

Anyways, I really need to sleep now so I have to leave the responsibility of this for you OH. It would be awesome if you have time to handle this situation with care. I will have very very limited time between now and tomorrow evening..

Man, this is going to be so brutal..